It leaves everyone involved damaged

The Wagner mutiny was years in the making, as Russia's system of competing powers finally collapsed.

The Wagner Group mercenaries marched 800 kilometers across Russia, shot down planes and helicopters, took over a regional military command, provoked a panic in Moscow—troops dug trenches, the mayor told everyone to stay home—and then stood down. Yet in a way, the strangest aspect of Saturday’s aborted coup was the reaction of the people of Rostov-on-Don, including the city’s military leaders, to the soldiers who arrived and declared themselves to be their new rulers.

The Wagner mercenaries showed up in the city early Saturday morning. They met no resistance. Nobody shot at them. One photograph, published by The New York Times, shows them walking at a leisurely pace across a street, one of their tanks in the background, holding yellow coffee cups.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s violent ex-con leader, posted videos of himself chatting with the local commanders in the courtyard of the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District. Nobody seemed to mind his being there.

Outside, street sweepers continued their work. Early in the morning, a few people came to gawk, but not many. After Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a panicked speech on television, comparing the situation to 1917 and evoking the ghost of civil war, one man pushing a bicycle was filmed berating the Wagnerites and telling them to go home. The troops laughed him off. But later in the day, more people showed up, and the atmosphere grew warmer.

People shook their hands, brought them food, took selfies. “People are bringing pirozhki, apples, chips. Everything there in the store has been bought to give to the soldiers,” one woman said on camera. In the evening, after Prigozhin had decided to stand down and go home (wherever home turns out to be), he drove away in an SUV with crowds filming him on their cellphones and cheering him on, as if he were a celebrity leaving a movie premiere or a gallery opening. Some chanted “Wagner! Wagner!” as the troops emerged into the street. This was the most remarkable aspect of the whole day: Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime—not the security services, not the army, and not the general public. On the contrary, many seemed sorry to see him go.

The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous “firehose of falsehoods”— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.

But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war. Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.

Because they are afraid, or because they don’t know of any alternative, or because they think it’s what they are supposed to say, they tell pollsters that they support Putin. And yet, nobody tried to stop the Wagner group in Rostov-on-Don, and hardly anybody blocked the Wagner convoy on its way to Moscow. The security services melted away, made no move and no comment. The military dug some trenches around Moscow and sent some helicopters; somebody appears to have sent bulldozers to dig up the highways, but that was all we could see. Who will respond if a more serious challenge to Putin ever emerges? Certainly the military will think twice: Perhaps a dozen Russian servicemen, mostly pilots, died at the hands of the Wagner mutineers, more than died during the failed coup of 1991. Nobody seems particularly bothered about them.

One day after this aborted coup, it is too early to speculate about Prigozhin’s true motives, about what he was really given in exchange for standing down, about where Putin really spent the day on Saturday—some say St. Petersburg, some say a dacha in Novgorod—or about anything else, really. But the flimsiness of this regime’s ideology and the softness of its support have been suddenly laid bare. Expect more repression as Putin tries to stay in charge, more chaos, or both.

Prigozhin has done so much damage in just two days that it will take his former patron years to fix it.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Good morning. Before we turn to the Sunday culture edition of this newsletter, here are some of our writers’ most recent stories to help you make sense of the situation in Russia.

Why didn’t the Wagner coup succeed? Prigozhin planned this. The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer. Frank is currently at work on a book about the first two years of the Biden presidency; he has recently written for The Atlantic about controversies in the book world and the act of psychoanalyzing American presidents. He’s currently reliving a transcendent music experience he shared with his daughter, wishing he could find a TV show as good as Succession—especially in the art of “sibling razzing”—and watching Bill Nighy any time he graces the screen.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Go ahead, try to explain milk. The ghost of a once era-defining show How the vape shops won

The Culture Survey: Franklin Foer

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: When my oldest daughter was 3, I made a determined effort to teach her how to eat with a fork and knife, culturally speaking. I bought used VHS copies of one of the most improbable shows in the history of network television, Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, in which a dashing Leonard Bernstein sweeps the hair from his face as he attempts to explain classical music to a CBS audience in the 1960s. For nearly two whole minutes, I managed to coerce her to sit on the couch with me in front of the black-and-white broadcast. Then she broke free and changed the channel to The Backyardigans.

I thought about this doomed experiment in parental pedantry recently because my daughter is now 18. A few weeks back, she graduated from high school, and she’s off to college in the fall. Just before the beginning of her second semester of senior year, we vowed (or was I coercing her again?) to watch every movie on the newly released Sight and Sound list of all-time greatest films. We were going to start with Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, the surprise at the top of the rankings. A family member dismissed the project as hopelessly pretentious, and sure enough, this plan didn’t fare any better with my daughter than my attempt to foist Bernstein on her.

But one of the joys of her teenage years has been our cultural convergence. Because she’s an enthusiast for gardening, a couple of months back, we jointly curated a Spotify playlist of songs about plants, which happens to be a ubiquitous musical metaphor.

During her senior year, we started going to concerts together for acts we both liked—to Big Thief and Phoebe Bridgers, to see a group from New Zealand called The Beths. (Expert in a Dying Field is the impeccable title of The Beths’ most recent album.) For Chanukah, she bought us tickets for a brassy Brooklyn group called Rubblebucket. I had barely heard of it. But attending the concert was one of the great musical experiences of my life. The band was exuberant—horns blaring, lead singer pushing her anaerobic capacity with manic dancing—and so were we.

In their book, All Things Shining, the philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that the transformative reading of Western classics—and moments of passionate engagement with culture—can help us rediscover purpose in a secular society, because it can supply a similar sensation of transcendence. (It’s a lovely short read.) They would call the experience of culturally induced sublimation “whooshing up.” At the 9:30 Club, with a band I barely knew, my daughter and I were, in fact, whooshing up. Because I knew that moment of fatherhood was so fleeting, it felt genuinely ecstatic.

The culture or entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: I find it annoying how many conversations return to the inadequacy of television after Succession. They are annoying because they are true. Every suggestion for a replacement is impoverished by comparison.

Like many couples, my wife and I will frequently watch shows on our devices at our own pace. (Yes, it’s a mark of my selfishness—and my inability to pass the marshmallow test—that I annoyingly race ahead.) She’s still making her way through Season 4. I’m rewatching episodes with her just so I can study the poetry of familial teasing. It takes characters uninhibited by superegos and morality to realize the literary heights of the sibling-razzing genre. [Related: The Succession plot point that explained the whole series]

An actor I would watch in anything: Bill Nighy. I would even watch him as a catatonic English civil servant confronting his own mortality. That’s the conceit of Living, which just began streaming on Netflix. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the screenplay, which is an adaptation of a Kurosawa film, which is an adaptation of a Tolstoy novella. The movie is borderline sappy but saved by its Englishness. In moments of catharsis, it pulls back just enough to stay classy, unable to fully express its emotions.

It’s disturbing to see Nighy play a character so old and inhibited, because he’s a balletic actor, usually bursting with charm. I love to watch him walk across the screen. He packs a Russian novel’s worth of character into his gait.

I’m an evangelist for his turn in the Worricker Trilogy, a series of BBC thrillers written by David Hare. The series is about the War on Terror. Nighy is a rogue MI5 agent who seeks to undermine the power-mad Tony Blair–like prime minister, played by Ralph Fiennes. For whatever reason, nobody seems to have ever heard about this miniseries, but it’s sitting there on Apple TV. [Related: The movie that helped Kazuo Ishiguro make sense of the world]

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: After Martin Amis’s death, I picked up a copy of his “novelized autobiography,” Inside Story, that was lying in the middle of a pile in the bedroom. It’s a book very much about mortality—that of his friends (Christopher Hitchens and Saul Bellow) and his own. Reviewing the book in The Atlantic, my colleague James Parker wrote, “He wants to lance the moment with language, and he wants his language to live forever.” Reading Amis’s own farewell, at the book’s end, it’s impossible to believe that it won’t. [Related: Jennifer Egan: I learned how to be funny from Martin Amis.]

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Searching for rumors about which players Arsenal Football Club might buy this summer.

The arts/culture/entertainment event I’m most looking forward to: I can’t wait to see the postponed Philip Guston exhibit at the National Gallery. The fact that this show was delayed has always struck me as the most ridiculous culture-war skirmish of our time.

The Week Ahead

California, a Slave State, a new book by Jean Pfaelzer that explores the history of slavery and resistance in the West (on sale Tuesday) The Bachelorette’s 20th season, featuring Charity Lawson, a 27-year-old therapist and the fourth Black Bachelorette in the show’s history (premieres on ABC this Monday) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which features Harrison Ford’s final performance in the role, alongside a performance from Phoebe Waller-Bridge (in theaters Friday)

Essay

Peter Garritano for The Atlantic

The Elegant, Utterly Original Comedy of Alex Edelman

By Adrienne LaFrance

In the long and checkered history of possibly terrible impulse decisions, here’s one for the ages: A few years ago, the comedian Alex Edelman decided on a whim to show up uninvited to a casual meeting of white nationalists at an apartment in New York City, and pose as one of them. Why? He was curious. He wanted to see what it would be like to be on the inside of a gathering that would never have knowingly included him, given that he is Jewish.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The radical reinvention of The Bear The real lesson of The Truman Show Pixar’s talking blobs are becoming more and more unsatisfying. The Valley girl, like, totally deserved better. Nine books that will actually make you laugh

Catch Up on The Atlantic

How a trip to the Titanic ended in tragedy Trump seems to be afraid, very afraid. Why not Whitmer?

Photo Album

A dog sits on its owner's belly during a mass yoga session on International Yoga Day in New York City's Times Square on June 21, 2023 (Spencer Platt / Getty)

Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, a mass yoga session in New York City, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

In announcing the deal purportedly brokered by the Belarusian leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, that Evgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the short-lived rebellion against Russia’s military leadership, would be permitted to “retire” to Belarus, in exchange for stopping his “March of Justice” to Moscow, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov explained that the deal, “was for the sake of a higher goal—to avoid bloodshed, to avoid internal confrontation, to avoid clashes with unpredictable results.”

That sounds very noble, except that only a few hours earlier, Peskov’s boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, gave a televised address describing Prigozhin’s mutiny as treason and “a betrayal,” that struck at the very heart of Russian statehood. He seemed to be preparing the Russian people for a civil war. So, for Prigozhin to literally fly off into the evening sunset (at least for now), is odd, to put it mildly. It is especially bizarre given that in Putin’s Russia, even teenagers can be jailed for posting anything faintly critical of the “special military operation” (it is illegal to call it a war) that the Russian defense forces have been pursuing in Ukraine since February 23, 2022. The liberal opposition figures Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza received prison sentences of 8.5 and 25 years respectively for their social-media criticisms of the war last year. While their weapons were words, Prigozhin’s were tanks and guns. One would think leading an armed rebellion is significantly more problematic for the regime than some tweets and interviews. So what is the true “higher goal” for which Prigozhin was let off the hook?

Evidently, there was genuine fear in the Kremlin of Prigozhin’s mutiny leading to a wider military rebellion. Indeed, it is striking that after announcing his intentions on Telegram, Prigozhin met no resistance in marching his forces into the city of Rostov on Don, the seat of Russia’s Southern Military District, and staging ground for the military effort in Eastern Ukraine. He was able to take over the command center in a matter of hours, and was even recorded chastising the Deputy Minister of Defense Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev for “guys dying because you are sending them into the meatgrinder in Ukraine.” Heading north from Rostov, the Wagner column reportedly made it within 200 kilometers of Moscow before Prigozhin announced on Telegram that his troops would be returning to their camps “as planned” in order to avoid spilling “big blood.” But his quick conquest of Rostov and rapid journey north toward Moscow indicates that some units of the Russian defense forces stationed along the way may have been at least passively, and perhaps even actively, supporting his mission.

Given how poorly the war in Ukraine has gone for the rank and file of the Russian military, it would be understandable if some junior officers empathized with Prigozhin’s complaints against the Russian high command. Casualty estimates run as high as 250,000, with perhaps a quarter of those being deaths. Commanders have reportedly abandoned their troops in battle, corruption is rampant, and undersupplied and underprepared soldiers have been used as cannon fodder.

Putin’s speech offered an explicit warning against joining the rebellion, providing implicit confirmation that Prigozhin was gaining followers as he moved toward Moscow. Further, the fact that Moscow was clearly preparing for a long and bloody battle, indicates that there was genuine concern that a broader conflict was imminent. Prigozhin’s column of mercenaries stopped less than 200 kilometers outside of the city, but rumors put some Wagnerites prepositioned in the capital. So Putin had ample reason to allow Lukashenko to negotiate a quick end to the rebellion, with a promise to let the mutineers, and especially Prigozhin, go free (at least for now).

What does all of this tell us about what might now be going on in Russia and how Putin might pursue the war in Ukraine going forward? While to us, Putin may look weak and ineffective, he will undoubtedly use his control over the Russian media to pin the rebellion on Ukraine, NATO, and Russia’s other enemies. He may even take credit for avoiding mass casualties in a civil war by making a deal with Prigozhin. Spinning the story as best he can, Putin himself will survive, although his carefully crafted myth of competence will be damaged. Over time, this might erode elite confidence, although it is unlikely to result in an open coup attempt any time soon.

Beyond this, the clear disorganization of the leadership’s response to Prigozhin’s short-lived rebellion can only be good for Ukraine. Wagner mercenaries delivered one of Russia’s few military victories in finally capturing the town of Bakhmut a few months ago. Now, they are off the battlefield. Further, there may well be more military mutinies to come.

Although this is not the end of the war or of Putin, the Wagner rebellion might yet prove the beginning of the end of both.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary leader of the Wagner Group, had earned the trust of Vladimir Putin. Then he staged a mutiny that rattled the Kremlin.